recognising and privileging non-western cultures in their appropriate place, so that the profession has a richer and much more diverse international practice. This is one means to achieve contemporary spaces that provide an authentic sense of place and home, and that reflect and connect to the people who live there. This paper sets out to examine the issue of mono-cultural practice, the examples of recent concerns expressed, and some moves to address the issue. The Mono-Cultural Concerns Chinese landscape architects and particularly more recent landscape architecture students1 have complained that contemporary teaching and practice in China does not reflect or respond to Chinese culture. That may be true because the profession now has as its contemporary base western-derived landscape understanding. In an interview of Chinese professors of landscape architecture reported in Landscape Architecture Magazine the following was noted: Some of the people who lead China’s most influential programs studied in the United States, and some of the programs have strong connections with American academics. Tsinghua University’s landscape architecture program was established with the help of a team of American landscape architects led by Laurie Olin, FASLA, of the University of Pennsylvania.2 However, recent scholarly work on landscape architecture theory from China reflects the different values Chinese people hold. It places importance on, among other things, naming places, or landscape features, such as rocks. Chinese, in contrast to western culture, emphasize poetry, emotion and symbolism when considering landscape. Chinese culture shares the attention to the visual or aesthetic aspects of landscape with western cultures, in contrast to many indigenous cultures, where intangible aspects may be more important. Meng, in a philosophical address explored poetry and events which are associated with landscapes as a means of interpreting and recognizing landscape values. Such thinking responds to the centuries old traditional Chinese understandings of gardewn and nature.3 He and others have explained that it is not only feng shui that encapsulates Chinese cultural understandings of landscape. There are many different philosophical understandings which have been promulgated over the centuries.4 Feng sui is an ecophilosophy which is relatively well-known in the west and has been adopted for centuries in China, but even this philosophy’s greater currency does not imply that it is part of teaching or mainstream understanding of landscape architecture in other parts of the globe. The more recent integration of Chinese culture into landscape architecture theory coincides with other activities such as the reprinting of an early Chinese writer on garden design5 and 1
Students at International IFLA student charrettes over a number of years, at IFLA Asia Pacific conferences such as in Japan in 2002, and at Shanghai Jiaotong University in April 2013, pers. comm. 2
Jost, D. 2013 LAM February.www.Landscapearchitecturemagazine. com/2013/02/08/the-great-exchange/ accessed 6 September 2013. 3
Meng Zhaozhen, 2013. Keynote paper, Jinzhou conference, China, May 2013.
4
Meng Zhaozhen, pers. comm., April 2013.
This cultural confidence was not always present in recent years. Although some Chinese landscape architects were selected by clients in China,10 western landscape consultants were frequently sought for landscape planning of prominent cities, and design of key city sites.11 In addition, landscape architecture had been removed from the university curriculum, and prior to its removal the focus had been on garden design as opposed to design of larger scale areas. Such larger sites in the public realm were instead planned and designed by Government. The clientled selection of western consultants may have been in part a symptom of the emerging elite city movement which seems to require that top cities have a sky tower (preferably the highest) and at least one exuberant Norman Porter building (as much as the lack of locally trained landscape architects). The more difficult to address issue has been the teaching, and thence practice, of landscape architecture following western cultural constructs. This can be explained by the training of the new teachers in America (primarily) where cultural diversity has been less of an issue. However, as those teachers have gained skills and maturity, more and more examples are occurring of planning and designs which not only have a Chinese cultural base but are also a fusion of ecological planning and green infrastructure management. Such designs12 create landscapes which reflect and value local places, rather than the apparently western inspired impositions. As Professor Hu Jie explains in an interview13: The first thing we face is our environmental problems, and right now, Beijing, and the whole of China, is in a period of fast development. As landscape architects who work on large scale development, our responsibility is to keep projects environmentally sound. It shows our respect for nature, and environmental quality. 8
Yao Yi-feng, ibid, page 83-85
9
Dai Qui-si, Wang Zhi-yang and Guo Xuan, ibid pages 114-119
10
Example are Zhou Gansshi’s carefully crafted work for a condominium development in Suzhou and Sun Xiaoxiang’s extensive botanic garden design work 11
One such example is the designs by Vincent Asselin of Canada in four key Shanghai parks. 12
5
For instance Hu Jie, Professor, Tsinghua University and consultant for the Beijing Olympic Forest Park
6
13
The book Yuan Ye was written in 1642 by Ji Cheng. Chinese Landscape Architecture 2013, Vol 29, 212, 08
7
Fu Fan ibid, page 54-69
20
anniversary celebrations and activities to recognise the author and publication; and the recognition of landscape architecture practice as an ‘A’ grade profession by the Government. While describing this as a renaissance of Chinese culture as it applies to landscape architecture may be making too much of the steps towards privileging Chinese culture in Chinese design, there is certainly much more interest and confidence in maintaining cultural integrity. A review of an edition of Chinese Landscape Architecture, the main professional journal,6 demonstrates this growing interest and confidence. The publication includes The Predicament and Prospect of Research on Chinese Traditional Gardens,7 discussion on landscape architecture from a cultural geographic viewpoint, 8and an article on classical landscape architecture design courses in which there is a need to explore and enhance the meaning and quality of landscape and that in turn requires teaching reform.9
www.asla.org/contentdetail.aspx?id=20102/accessed Sept 6, 2013.